The distance between Christianity and the 4 Gospels

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honorentheos
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Re: The distance between Christianity and the 4 Gospels

Post by honorentheos »

I'd like to touch on something I think happens often in these discussions. That being, I think all too often the term, "God" becomes a placeholder for, "that which is beyond our comprehension in a universe that is far less rational than the rationalists among us believe it to be."

The problem with this is the term, "God" is loaded. Some people may be willing to kick the god-can all the way down the road to the edge of human knowledge and simply agree with naturalism as the term used for, "that which we can explain" and coyly shrug off the expectation that God needs explained in any way that is beholden to rationalism. Because to this person God is essentially, "That which is beyond reason". But the issue is that person is camping under the same umbrella as the person who is engaging in violence in the name of God, or harmful discrimination, or disavowing the use of life-saving medical science, or bilking widows of their mites, or some other ethically dark behaviors.

And when that same person then says, "This isn't due to God being the problem, but how people abuse the idea of God" I want to walk away from that foolishness. Because by this person's own reasoning all we have is an idea of God, and it seems the vast majority who use the term are pretty damn sure they know exactly what they mean by it, and that idea behind it isn't just an idea but a pretty opinionated dude with harsh ideas about some oddly specific things. Use a different term.

So if I use the term, "emergence" in the strongly unsupported way of describing, "That which we don't understand but appears to be more than the sum of what we understand of prior conditions, which prior conditions we do have a better understanding of currently" I'm fine with the person not liking that who soft sells "God" as the better option. If some nerdy physicists grumble about softer sciences and quantum mechanics being irrational, and views the counter-intuitive nature of such as demonstrating our meat brains being limited in the ability to fully explain the universe rationally, I'm embracing the irrational, emergent qualities of said universe as they are experienced and being perfectly fine not knowing. "I don't know" is more than a perfectly acceptable answer that doesn't require external explanation. It further has the benefit of integrity. And if this person is fine with not knowing, too, and really just wants people to drop the urge to elevate rationalism to the same place as "god", cool. We actually agree on that point. People making a religion out of science and rationalism are being irrational. Maybe they can't help it, but it still seems very likely we will never really understand how everything works. But do we really need to elevate the loaded "God" term as the alternative? That seems to be the workings of a defeated rationalist, not someone who is really dealing well with the unknowability of the universe, so they mistakenly are willing to play Russian roulette with human civilization with a loaded gun that is the term, "god".
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Re: The distance between Christianity and the 4 Gospels

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So if I use the term, "emergence" in the strongly unsupported way of describing, "That which we don't understand but appears to be more than the sum of what we understand of prior conditions, which prior conditions we do have a better understanding of currently" I'm fine with the person not liking that who soft sells "God" as the better option.
Emergence, as in the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, has been called "radical emergence". Emergence as in cellular automata doing cool things that you can't predict, that's just regular emergence, and I think it is a useful concept because the point is not to try to understand the minutia, but playing with parameters and see how that affects the emergent hive.

Deep BS thought can be bad for anybody, but I see a lot of disagreement in secular BS thought, and there isn't the same kind of praise from serious academics of people like Dawkins as there is for Jorden Peterson and William L. Craig from religion. I believe the Templeton prize, which awards religion-friendly pseudoscience, is now substantially larger than the Nobel Prize.

Anyway, A couple days ago, Smolin's bro Peter Woit was on Lex, and I watched the whole thing. Woit is a die-hard skeptic. It was fun watching him deflect Lex's bait into the fringe. Lex is far better than Joe, but he's got to hold an audience and everyone wants to hear what the greatest minds have to say on the big topics. Woit has no interest.

The fringe really does end up being mush. Lex brought up (Wolfram's?) idea of the universe as emergent from automata (implying the laws of the universe arise from automata)-- Lex is an AI guy -- and Woit flicked it away. I had to chuckle because another one of Lex's big things is reality as a simulation. He'd just asked Woit about that, how complicated would it be to create a simulation that would be like real reality? Woit deflected.

Some of these ideas go together badly. The simulation argument says that if we believe that it's possible to simulate reality via a computer, then we are most likely living in a simulation ourselves because (it's assumed) the processing power to simulate real-reality is cheap. What are the odds we live in the underlying real-reality rather than one of the many simulations? But if the laws of the universe are created by automata, then why assume simulations are simulating the underlying world that created us rather than generating a uniquely weird creation that just happens to arise from automata?

Some other implications. When you think about it this way, you realize how distasteful a multi-verse is to postulate, just to save your ass. One of the arguments against the simulation argument is that creating our universe is too processor intensive -- to program a world that is built from quantum mechanics is too intensive. The response to that is you don't have to simulate quantum mechanics, you just have to program something that looks like quantum mechanics to the world inhabitants every time they look. But then, in the "real" world created by automata, given that parallelism of automata and traditional computing are ultimately equivalent, however such a simulation is accomplished, there is no reason for me to believe that a "real" world created by automata creates a universe with physical laws the way we think of the laws, rather than what looks like laws but is ultimately just the program inserting something that looks like QM when we look closely. Basically these are just restatements of the problem of induction.
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Re: The distance between Christianity and the 4 Gospels

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honorentheos wrote:
Sun Dec 05, 2021 4:17 am
Let's say I have been using "emergence" in the same way you use "choice" and then what?
If you are, that's fine. I didn't mean to argue with you in particular. I was reacting to the word "emergence", with which I have a beef. It's this anti-reductionist shibboleth, and I'm a die-hard reductionist.

Likewise my dismissal of many-worlds: I wasn't arguing with you, just mentioning it as one of the options. It had a bit of a vogue back when I was a post-doc, so maybe I still think it's on everyone's radar when it isn't. I think it deserves mention in any discussion of the problem of initial conditions, because it does eliminate the problem of initial conditions, just at too high a price, in my view.

I wouldn't claim that fine tuning is proof of God. I don't buy the common ID arguments about fundamental constants and so on. The more profound fine tuning is of initial conditions to produce things as they actually are rather than anything else whatever, good or bad. I don't say that this is proof of God, either. My point is that it's something tremendous, whatever it is.

Theists are not really postulating an explanation bigger than what is needed to explain the facts. Anything that could explain the facts would have to be about as big as their God, at least within the wide ballparks that one has to use to measure this kind of size. This is what I've been trying to articulate. I haven't been meaning to argue against anyone here.
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Re: The distance between Christianity and the 4 Gospels

Post by Marcus »

Physics Guy wrote:
Sun Dec 05, 2021 8:29 pm
...Theists are not really postulating an explanation bigger than what is needed to explain the facts. Anything that could explain the facts would have to be about as big as their God, at least within the wide ballparks that one has to use to measure this kind of size. This is what I've been trying to articulate. I haven't been meaning to argue against anyone here.
I would have to slightly disagree, but maybe this is just a vocabulary issue. It is my understanding that 'god-type' explanations include a supernatural component, whereas a natural explanation may have to be very, very complex, but wouldn't cross that line into supernatural, as I understand the word.
Supernatural:
attributed to some force *beyond scientific understanding or **[beyond] the laws of nature.
If supernatural just means 'not yet understood but ultimately as natural as everything else,' like the first part*, then ok. I'm not sure all would agree on that definition though. The second part** is more my understanding.

(I'm guessing Midgley would go for the single asterisk version. He really loses his mind if someone suggests Mormons believe in the "supernatural".)
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Re: The distance between Christianity and the 4 Gospels

Post by Physics Guy »

I agree that words can be loaded and that can be a problem. My feeling is that "God" has a long enough history in abstract philosophical discourse that one ought to be able to use it for a vaguely defined creator being. If people are bothered by the word, I'm happy to use a different label. I don't think I should be accused of trying to smuggle in jihadism or something just for using a long and widely used term.
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Re: The distance between Christianity and the 4 Gospels

Post by Marcus »

Physics Guy wrote:
Sun Dec 05, 2021 8:58 pm
I agree that words can be loaded and that can be a problem. My feeling is that "God" has a long enough history in abstract philosophical discourse that one ought to be able to use it for a vaguely defined creator being. If people are bothered by the word, I'm happy to use a different label. I don't think I should be accused of trying to smuggle in jihadism or something just for using a long and widely used term.
Oh i agree there. Sorry, i was going the other direction with the line between natural and supernatural. I just read the other comment, and yes, that seems to be far too broad of an umbrella if jihadism makes it in.
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Re: The distance between Christianity and the 4 Gospels

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Physics Guy wrote:
Sun Dec 05, 2021 8:29 pm
honorentheos wrote:
Sun Dec 05, 2021 4:17 am
Let's say I have been using "emergence" in the same way you use "choice" and then what?
If you are, that's fine. I didn't mean to argue with you in particular. I was reacting to the word "emergence", with which I have a beef. It's this anti-reductionist shibboleth, and I'm a die-hard reductionist.
Fair enough. I view the term as I said originally, having two meanings of which one is fairly benign. It would be the closest to the above idea of "choice" as I believe you used it and for which it seems we generally agree. I do favor the use of emergence in the way you apparently dislike but I guess to me it isn't a claim one has found a solution so much as outlined the form such phenomena take that are poorly understood. I should probably adopt the full phrase Gad pointed out and differentiate radical emergence.


If someone were to imagine a clear cube using which one could assign any given poster on this board a position on each of the three axis of "rationalist - empiricist", "naturalist - supernaturalist", and "absolutist - relativist", it becomes easy to misunderstand a person's perspective by merely looking at one face of the cube. Two people with diametrically opposing views on one of those axis could be mistakenly assumed to be similar in view because the alignment on the other two axis makes it appear to be so. My sense of the discussion is it is easy for all of us to fall into the trap of assigning a crude and largely most opposed binary position to someone who is suggesting something on one of those axis with which one disagrees. For example, it seems to me that the "heatmap" of the discussion is roughly an argument between theism (supernaturalism-empiricism) and naturalism (rationalist-naturalism), but of the people participating, MG is the only one I think fully occupies one of those two positions. You and huckelberry seem quick close on being supernaturalist-leaning, yet it seems you both are coming to it from different directions on the rationalist-empiricist axis because you both seem to have different reasons for approaching the discussion from a relativist view. I say that because, despite your comment about being reductionist, the facts seem to me to be you have found reductionism has limits and you as disillusioned with that approach...so absolutes might be preferred but experience has turned this into a preference that doesn't obtain outside of certain conditions.

I say all of that because I personally don't want to get bogged down into discussing what one person represents in a discussion around one another, but rather to engage the actual positions a person holds and is interested in discussing.
Likewise my dismissal of many-worlds: I wasn't arguing with you, just mentioning it as one of the options. It had a bit of a vogue back when I was a post-doc, so maybe I still think it's on everyone's radar when it isn't. I think it deserves mention in any discussion of the problem of initial conditions, because it does eliminate the problem of initial conditions, just at too high a price, in my view.
To me this represents one of many positions towards which I'm agnostic. I'm not sure that the anthropic principle demands an answer so much as it represents a peak to be climbed if one is so inclined.
I wouldn't claim that fine tuning is proof of God. I don't buy the common ID arguments about fundamental constants and so on. The more profound fine tuning is of initial conditions to produce things as they actually are rather than anything else whatever, good or bad. I don't say that this is proof of God, either. My point is that it's something tremendous, whatever it is.
Theists are not really postulating an explanation bigger than what is needed to explain the facts. Anything that could explain the facts would have to be about as big as their God, at least within the wide ballparks that one has to use to measure this kind of size. This is what I've been trying to articulate. I haven't been meaning to argue against anyone here.
Again, I dislike using broad categories like "theists" like this because you and MG are both holding theism-based positions in this thread but you are radically different when it comes to what you think. It means the term isn't helpful, and is instead quite disruptive to productive discussion. Some theists posit the world is less than 10,000 years old and Adam/Eve were literally formed by god in the Garden of Eden. Quo vadis?
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Re: The distance between Christianity and the 4 Gospels

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To come back to the discussion about fine tuning, it seems to me that we ought to be able to ask more questions to use to investigate what the thought experiment suggests regarding underlying motives influencing the currents moving the direction of the universe (using these phrases poetically, not scientifically).

If our being here wasn't a given, but depended on certain initial conditions being "selected for", and we find that fantastical that it occurred, the follow up question to me is, "Why is that fantastical?" I think it's more fantastical that we are conscious of this at all, and as has been made clear, what makes that possible isn't obvious when investigated rationally and naturalism lacks a clear explanation for it, either. But what does that mean when it comes to attempting to intuit the motives of the prime mover of the universe? Whatever that may be, so what?
Last edited by honorentheos on Mon Dec 06, 2021 4:20 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: The distance between Christianity and the 4 Gospels

Post by honorentheos »

Physics Guy wrote:
Sun Dec 05, 2021 8:58 pm
I agree that words can be loaded and that can be a problem. My feeling is that "God" has a long enough history in abstract philosophical discourse that one ought to be able to use it for a vaguely defined creator being. If people are bothered by the word, I'm happy to use a different label. I don't think I should be accused of trying to smuggle in jihadism or something just for using a long and widely used term.
I don't argue that you, yourself, are smuggling in jihadists under your tails into the discussion. But if one chooses to use a term like, "god" and does little to differentiate one's use of the term on the outset of the discussion, the MGs of the world are bringing their anti-LGBT, neo-conservative divinely favored western-US Mormon Christianity in the conversation under your tails, absolutely.
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Re: The distance between Christianity and the 4 Gospels

Post by honorentheos »

Gadianton wrote:
Sun Dec 05, 2021 6:33 pm
Anyway, A couple days ago, Smolin's bro Peter Woit was on Lex, and I watched the whole thing. Woit is a die-hard skeptic. It was fun watching him deflect Lex's bait into the fringe. Lex is far better than Joe, but he's got to hold an audience and everyone wants to hear what the greatest minds have to say on the big topics. Woit has no interest.

The fringe really does end up being mush. Lex brought up (Wolfram's?) idea of the universe as emergent from automata (implying the laws of the universe arise from automata)-- Lex is an AI guy -- and Woit flicked it away. I had to chuckle because another one of Lex's big things is reality as a simulation. He'd just asked Woit about that, how complicated would it be to create a simulation that would be like real reality? Woit deflected.
Thanks for sharing this. It was really interesting if amusingly dry. I checked after to see how many views it had on YouTube and was pleasantly surprised to see it being over 60k.

Of the many interesting things that came up, I found myself wondering at the end why Woit caved to the appeal of attempting to explain overly simplified, relatable analogs for complex ideas when he originally made it clear that there was a lot of danger in doing so and sidestepped a few discussion points on those grounds. As the Coen brothers captured, "Even I don't understand the dead cat." It seemed once twistor-theory came up and his enthusiasm was engaged, he slipped readily into wanting to engage the topic through narrative because narrative is what they had in the moment.
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